ASK ME AGAIN, by Clare Sestanovich
Clare Sestanovich’s debut story collection, “Objects of Desire” (2021), introduced readers to a formally accomplished writer whose style calls to mind alienated, realist forebears such as Ann Beattie, Richard Yates and Mary Gaitskill.
Her subject matter, too, is squarely old-school New Yorker (where she used to be an editor, and where several of her stories have been published). Her protagonists are often well educated but stifled: by relationships, jobs and lives that aren’t as interesting as they hoped they would be. “On the other side of the door, the party sounded like every other party” is a not-untypical observation.
Sestanovich’s first novel, “Ask Me Again,” is tonally of a piece with her short fiction, following the book-smart, emotionally tentative Eva from high school in New York City to her first years out of college. Eva’s slow but consistent upward trajectory from a prestigious, Yale-like university to a “boring internship at an exciting newspaper” in Washington, D.C., is contrasted with the troubled journey of her friend Jamie, who is brilliant, wealthy and perhaps, like one of Salinger’s Glass siblings, too loosely tethered to the material world for his own good.
While Eva muddles through an on-again off-again relationship with Eli, an aspiring politician and future communications director for a young congresswoman from New York who looks a lot like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Jamie struggles at a school upstate “for good kids with bad habits,” moves into Eva’s childhood bedroom in Brooklyn for a long stretch and becomes deeply involved in a social-justice-oriented storefront church.
Each of these elements makes sense intellectually — the novel is insistently concerned with different ways of being “of use” to the world — but the proportions are off. The first half of the book is a staid bildungsroman about the loneliness of elite achievement; think Elif Batuman’s “The Idiot” with fewer jokes. The second half is filled with incidents — the congresswoman becomes a central figure and a source of romantic intrigue; Jamie is involved in a deadly warehouse fire; there’s a mass shooting at a high school in Queens — that can feel both peripheral and not quite real.
This is partly because of frustrating storytelling decisions: The immediate consequences of the shooting aren’t much explored, and the congresswoman’s biography is so similar to Ocasio-Cortez’s that seeing her play a charged game of truth or dare with her staff comes across as somewhat wishful fan fiction. But there’s also a more fundamental disjunction between the novel’s political stakes and the quieter drama of Eva’s personal and philosophical development. Things happen around her — “Arguments were rehearsed, performed, applauded,” she thinks numbly in the wake of the shooting — but not usually to her.
Sestanovich can be wonderfully observant about sexual dynamics, as in an exactingly described round of post-breakup sexting and a surprising election-night hookup; and, as in her stories, her protagonists’ palpable disappointment with the world is endearing, even if its source isn’t always clear. But on the scale of a novel, the author’s hesitancy becomes unsatisfying. There’s a failure to commit to plotlines and characters, a skittish abandonment of deeper engagement at key moments.
Jamie in particular remains a cipher. “What was Jamie into? Art? Politics? Enlightenment?” Eva thinks, halfway through the book. “He seemed to be continually changing, and yet any minute now he would appear at the door as he always did — entirely, unmistakably himself.” We can never completely know another person, sure, but I wished the author had gotten a little bit closer. Some parties do sound different from others.
ASK ME AGAIN | By Clare Sestanovich | Knopf | 304 pp. | $28
